Most Web pages are designed for display on a desktop or laptop display screen. Such display screens have somewhat consistent sizes and aspect ratios, which allows the Web page designer to make certain assumptions about the layout of text, graphics, and logical sections of the Web page. For example, Web pages are designed to place advertisements, controls, links, text, and other content within the anticipated bounds of a desktop or laptop display screen.
One problem with this existing approach is that the incompatible sizes and aspect ratios of handheld devices or large screen displays do not accommodate a typical Web page designed for a desktop or laptop system. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates three parts of a Web page 100 as shown on a handheld device at different horizontal scroll points. An article 110 from Slate, an online magazine, is too wide to be displayed on a handheld device without horizontal scrolling. To read the article 110, the user must scroll horizontally back and forth as each line of text is read. This approach has very negative usability characteristics, including the loss of spatial context perceivable by the user. Users are relatively comfortable with scrolling down to read text, but users are less comfortable with horizontal scrolling (back and forth), particularly with every line of text. Likewise, if the Web page is displayed on a large screen display, such as in a convention hall in which the display is zoomed in to make the text large enough for the audience members to see, repeated horizontal scrolling is unworkable for most audiences.
In addition, for Web pages with multiple sections of layout, such as the page shown in FIG. 3, multiple peripheral sections may take up valuable display real estate in a handheld device or large screen display. As shown by display 102 of FIG. 1, the inclusion of section 104 in the display 102 severely limits the amount of section 110 displayed in the first horizontal position, thereby contributing to the need to scroll horizontally in order to read the article in section 110.
The problem of viewing Web pages on a small screen, such as that of a handheld device or PDA, is particularly emphasized when a user is searching the Web. For example, when viewing the search results from a popular Web search engine, such as www.google.com, references or links to Web pages satisfying the specified search criteria are listed on the search results Web page. However, after selecting one of the links to a search result target page, it is difficult for a user to quickly find the search-criteria-satisfying elements (i.e., search hits) of the resulting Web page because of the small size of the handheld device's display. A zooming operation can help to make the text readable, but, with the display zoomed, portions of the search results target page are typically obscured and spatial context is lost. Again, inconvenient horizontal scrolling, for example, may be required to incrementally view the entire page. Therefore, the options of zooming and scrolling do not provide a convenient and comfortable user interface for a search tool.